The sun sets on our final day, and here are five learnings we’re taking with us from day two.

Riding high off the carnival treats from the last night’s SmartyParty, Hiring Success 19 attendees braved another misty morning in San Francisco as they congregated at Pier 27 for day two of panel discussions, breakout sessions, and the highly anticipated Hackathon and Recruiting Startup Awards ceremonies. Day one set a high bar for exciting content, but the crowd appeared ready for a second round after fueling up at the fresh donut bar. How could day two top yesterday’s activity?

Day one of Hiring Success 19 saw SmartRecruiters announce the launch of its new corporate social responsibility (CSR) program – Reverse Recruiting. This three-pillar approach to CSR includes SmartRecruiters donating one percent of the company’s equity towards a future foundation, making best-of-breed recruiting tools available to non-profits of all sizes through free and discounted products, and hosting Reverse Recruiting weeks across all global offices four times annually. And, for this last part, SmartRecruiters wants to invite you and your company to join in.

Learn more about Reverse Recruiting, and how to host your own event, here!

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s events to revisit the best reveals and takeaways for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.

1. New Hiring Success function to support customer achievement

Hiring Is Success laid out SmartRecruiters’ 2019 product roadmap, as well as a vision for the future of TA!

With the announcement of Rebecca Carr as SVP of Hiring Success comes a new branch of SmartRecruiters, staffed by TA experts (all of whom have previously held high-level positions in people functions) who will provide SmartRecruiters’ programmatic support in the areas of awareness, transformation, acceleration, and optimization.

Here’s what this support will look like on the ground:

Awareness – Business engagement around the metrics that matter, where the business needs to be, and how it will get there.

• Business Audit
• Implementation Success
• End-user testing and analysis

Transformation – Setting realistic goals for change in alignment with desired performance metrics & developing programs to support it.

• Product success
• In-product education
• Candidate and user Surveys

Acceleration: Differentiating against the competition with innovative programs, new technologies, and aggressive performance goals.

• Pilot programs
• Local events
• Business apps and integrations

Optimization: Consistent re-evaluation of existing processes and technologies to ensure your business is staying current against the market and competitors.

• Expert Workshops
• Hiring success dashboards
• Process and Technology Certification

2. What are the concrete actions you can take to turn good intentions into results when it comes to gender equality?

Gender Inequality offered solutions and insight into the microaggressions women experience through the hiring process and within company culture…

“It’s important to keep the channels of communication open, especially with the hiring manager. Keep explaining and re-explaining the actual needs of the role and how those need could be addressed by a diverse group of candidates.” – Sarah Blackmore

“Examine corporate values and how they apply to marginalized people. If you have a corporate value that says ‘assume good intent’, that value might tell someone that they have to assume that this person with more privilege is making a mistake for the first time.” – Margarett Quigley

“Having lived most of my life as a white male I never thought about privilege until my transition. Now, as a woman, I’ve lost my male privilege, I see that people generally treat gender equality as a woman’s problem, not as an everyone problem. People want to be themselves as at work, but women find it hard to simply do that.” – Joanne Lockwood

3. Optimizely sweeps gold at the 2019 Hackathon

Three teams locked themselves in a room for the last 24 hours to build on top of SmartRecruiters’ APIs for the grand prize of $5000 in this year’s Hackathon.

While each team competed admirably, Optimizely took the grand prize with Action Center, an app that solves for task completion lag time.

Right now, Hiring Managers have to search flooded inboxes for buried at-mentions, but what if all hiring tasks were in a dashboard that they could easily click into via mobile – resolving tasks in moments of free time throughout the day? Action Center does just that. Now, hiring managers have access to a task dashboard on the SmartRecruiters mobile app homepage where they can easily click into tasks and send digital nudges to other members of the hiring team to do the same.

4. Be a recession-proof recruiter

Matt Charney talked the long game in Recruiting in a Recession. Economy and labor trends are cyclical, and just because we aren’t in a recession now doesn’t mean there isn’t one coming. So, how should recruiters make themselves critical to business success in fat times so they stay competitive in the lean? Here’s the short answer…

• Treat recruiting like business school: ask many many questions.
• Make your hiring managers happy. Most recruiters rate their performance as stellar, while most hiring managers rate their recruiters as subpar – bridge that gap!
• Measure the metrics you, as a recruiter, control.
• Don’t spend budget just because you can – make sure it will affect P&L positively!

5. Recruiting Startup Awards

Over 100 recruiting technologies competed for a chance to pitch their products on the  mainstage, but five finalists got the chance to pitch to the entire Hiring Success 19 audience.  This was a moment to celebrate innovation in TA, and, after deliberation from an expert panel of judges – as well as the audience – Candidate.ID took gold.

Candidate.ID’s software allows organizations to create genuine talent pipelines and easily identify candidates as cold, warm, and ‘hire-ready’​ in real time, claiming to reduce time-to-shortlist by 50 percent.

An increasing number of businesses are turning to more proactive hiring strategies to remain competitive in today’s job market economy. Reactive hiring no longer yields high-quality talent, Candidate.ID addresses this problem by zeroing in on pipeline automation, offering tools and insights that enhance hiring teams’ ability to source, discover, and nurture talent ahead of business needs.

***

Thanks so much to all our attendees, and we hope to see you next time at Hiring Success 19 – Europe!

In the first-ever SmartRecruiters Hackathon, customers tested the limits of the platform API and their own creativity in just 24 hours.

When the right tools for the job don’t exist you need to invent them. This sentiment captures the spirit behind SmartRecruiters’ first-ever Hackathon challenge, issued at the Hiring Success conference last March.

The feature-rich SmartRecruiters open Marketplace API offers development teams a platform to build applications for direct integration into the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. To test the flexibility of the SmartRecruiters API, the Hiring Success Hackathon gave four customer teams a SmartRecruiters advisor and 24 hours to design, build, and implement new platform features that would offer value to users, and demonstrate innovation and creativity. With a $5,000 grand prize on the line the four teams quickly set upon their task.

At the end of the competition, the four teams presented their finished products in front of judges Bill Boorman, Steve Fogarty, and Ethan Medeiros, all of whom were beyond impressed with the final results.

“The one thing we were unanimous about was that we genuinely could have made any one of these products a winner,” said Bill Boorman. “That made it difficult to judge because they were all on the money.” Steve Fogarty continued, commenting that “every one of those products we found useful.”

“I was impressed with all of the teams,” said Ethan Medeiros. “Every one of them came up with an idea and a build-out in just 24 hours.” Boorman went on to praise the teams for their efforts, claiming, “I think the standard of product after 24 hours was better than I’ve seen at a Hackathon before. What you usually see is more buggy, and you have to imagine what the products will eventually look like.”

After a brief deliberation, the judges declared team Visa the winner for its internal candidate mobility add-on. With more companies focusing on promoting candidates from within their organization, the Hackathon judges recognized Visa’s solution to the rising demand for in-house talent. “The product that I’m being asked about most often is something for internal candidates,” said Steven Fogarty. “Right now they can search for a job and apply and that’s it. This next generation of talent coming through the door cares about transparency, their data, and what feedback people are giving them.”

*****

Team Avery Dennison
Avery Dennison, the global manufacturer and distributor of self-adhesive labels, apparel branding tags, and label materials, focused on creating a tool to optimize their recruiter tasks, as high-volume hiring is a key function of their business. The average time for a job posting is about 1.5 hours and can cost $37.50–$457.50 depending on the method. For companies like Avery Dennison that need to fill thousands of positions, recruiters and hiring managers spend too much valuable time manually publishing and updating their open job postings.

Rather than navigate a littered desktop of notifications and hastily scrawled Post-it notes, Avery Dennison built a Google Chrome plugin that allows recruiters to specify a date range for open positions as they input the job description and details. “As recruiters publish jobs, they don’t need to set a reminder,” says Mike Penny, TA Manager at Avery Dennison. “It eliminates some of that potential for error in forgetting to unpublish or pull the req down.”

To further automate the process, when a job posting expires, the feature deploys an email to recruiters and hiring managers with the total number of applicants and the top-match candidates according to the SmartRecruiters AI Recruiting Assistant.

Team Square

Square, the financial services company producing software and hardware payment products for mobile and tablet, looked to also reduce the number of non-value-added recruiter tasks by optimizing their interview scheduling protocols.

Square processes multiple candidate interviews every week, and manually coordinating six different schedules for the members of their hiring committees is inefficient. “That time cost from the recruiting coordinating side is extremely intensive,” says Stephanie Snyder, Recruiting Manager at Square, who estimates the company spends an estimated 240 hours per week on scheduling tasks.

Aiming to cut that time in half, the Square team built an application that assembles an interview panel of your choosing and schedules an interview time slot. Currently, panel organizers at Square toggled Google Calendar and SmartRecruiters to view team availability and schedule interviews, but the Square team predicts that a future version of their application would include a visual calendar UI that integrates these two functions in one dashboard to improve scheduling efficiency.

Once a panel is created, members can also access and revise notes about a candidate throughout the hiring process, a feature that eliminates the need to manually pull candidate data after the interview.

Team VISA

Visa, the financial juggernaut with over 12,400 employees in five major hubs worldwide, sought to answer the question: How can we retain our best talent after hiring? Visa’s answer was to build internal mobility add-on that makes it easier for employees to apply for new opportunities within the company.

Visa’s team of developers structured its strategy around three essential criteria that internal candidates seek:

1. More details, transparency, and information on the front end of the recruiting process.
2. Updates about the status of applications already submitted.
3. Where they are in the application process.

To encourage more internal candidate applications, the Visa team of developers designed their tool to be a seamless and transparent process, beginning with the login page, which quickly ushers internal candidates to the dashboard with a single-click sign in. To smooth the transition from Visa’s internal portal to the SmartRecruiters ATS, the team branded their dashboard, which automatically prioritizes newer internal postings on top of the feed.

When a new position is available, candidates can view the names of the recruiters and hiring managers for that position, and apply with just one click, as their user profile automatically fills in all relevant user data on the application. Candidates can view all jobs to which they have applied from the main dashboard.

Team SmartRecruiters

Riding the wave of excitement following SmartRecruiters’ spring release announcement, SmartRecruiters’ own team of developers couldn’t resist building their own new feature for the Hackathon. The SR team built an integration between Facebook Jobs and SmartRecruiters that allows companies to advertise their open positions in the Facebook Jobs page and give candidates the ability to view, share, and apply for jobs through their social profiles.

“This is all live, people can apply for these positions right now,” said Jem Sweeney, Product Manager at SmartRecruiters, demonstrating how the integration encourages candidates to share open positions among their network and answer screening questions all within Facebook’s platform. “You get a massive boost in your ability to get jobs in front of people and get referrals, as people can recommend jobs and apply immediately.” To attract applicants within certain industries or demographics, companies can also leverage Facebook’s native advertising and targeting algorithms to reach candidates without any additional effort or resources.

The Hiring Success 18 conference is rapidly approaching and, of course, we’ll have all the top speakers, influencers and professionals you’d expect from HR tech’s biggest event. On top of all that, we’ve also planned something rather special.

SmartRecruiters will break new ground in the HR-tech space by launching our first annual Hiring Success hackathon. The event, which runs from March 13th-14th, will see 10 teams of SmartRecruiters customers going under the hood, and head-to-head, to create the next great SmartRecruiters feature.

Jumping into a hackathon can be a daunting prospect, especially if you’re not a master developer or coder. However, whereas hackathons traditionally cater towards these professions, SmartRecruiters want to change things up by extending the invitation to anyone who’s ever wanted to make a change to our platform.

With that mind, we’ve compiled seven tips which will help any hackathon newbies survive, and enjoy their first time.

Develop Your Ideas In Advance

We start with perhaps the most important tip of all: prepare an idea. It doesn’t have to be a fully fledged plan with pie charts and Powerpoint slides, but you should at least come to a hackathon armed with some kind of basic premise. It could even be as basic as identifying a problem with a piece of existing software, therefore allowing you to direct the entire team’s brainwaves towards finding a solution.

Additionally, try to develop your idea into a quick and snappy elevator pitch. This will help you quickly and clearly explain it to your teammates, an important tactic in the hectic opening minutes of a hackathon.

However, do not be too precious with your idea. Let others suggest theirs, or make adjustments to yours. Perhaps they have some experience or expertise which could prove invaluable. Remember: hackathons are collaborative events.

Get a Decent Night’s Sleep

Hackathons, as the name suggests, are extended gruelling exercises design to test both your speed and endurance. Usually they’re at least 24 hours, but can run as long as 48. With this mind, it’s going to pay to get a decent night’s sleep before things kicks off. Although it’s quite possible to sleep during the event, it’s not guaranteed and any sleep you do get will not be particularly restful.

Instead, perhaps stay in and work on your idea, or even better, just chill out and watch your favorite TV show. You’re not going to get much ‘me’ time during the actual hackathon, so don’t be afraid to pamper yourself before you dive into the coding chaos.

Swot Up on Some Coding Lingo

By no means are hackathons only the domain of coders and developers. In fact, non-technical team members can often be instrumental in other ways, such as managing the project and directing team members.

Having said that, if you’re not a developer, it wouldn’t hurt to learn some of the basics of their work. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing code, but it would be helpful to know some of the lingo behind building a product. This will speed up communication and avoid you spiralling into a mire of confusion.

Keep It Simple

The objective of a hackathon is not to create a complete, glossy and expansive app. There just isn’t enough time for that. Instead, aim to create a functional product with features which clearly address the problem you identified. Not only is this easier to produce, it’s also easier to sell to the judges during your presentation.

Building a fancy product with great user experience and all the bells and whistles might look good, but there’s no guarantee it’s going to win against a basic, well-defined and functional app. In a hackathon, a working product is always better than a pretty one.

Don’t Forget To Eat, Drink and Rest

It might sound strange, but once you’re stuck into a hackathon, it’s easy forget about your basic human requirements.
Hydration, in particular, is critical to keep all your systems going. Failing to attend to this will result in sluggishness, lack of creativity and probably headaches. So, make sure you always have a bottle of water on the go. Additionally avoid energy drinks and sugary treats as much as possible. They might give you a temporary boost but in the long run you’re probably going to end up crashing.

Beer is a controversial subject. Traditionally, it goes against the above mentioned hydration rule, but for some it can improve cognitive functions – to a point. In fact, it has often been a drink of choice among coders, even leading to a phenomenon known as Ballmer’s Peak. Named after Microsoft developer Steve Ballmer, this suggests that chugging a couple of brewskies can endow the drinker with a peak in performance, although continued consumption predictably results in a massive decline. According to anecdotal evidence, the sweet spot lies somewhere around two pints. A University of Illinois study even confirmed its existence, and suggested a blood alcohol level of 0.075 is ideal. Don’t over do it though, no one likes working with a hangover.

Rest, even if it’s not full-blown slumber, is also of critical importance. If you’re struggling with a line of code, or you find your eyesight going a bit blurry, it might be time for a bit of a rest. This could be anything from a five minute wander around the room, to a 20 minute micro-sleep or an hour long extended chill-out. It might seem like a waste of time, but you will generally perform much better after returning from a break than trying to break through a wall.

Communicate

When working with any team, communication is key. This is especially true for a hackathon where you might be working with new people and in a compressed, and potentially chaotic, period of time. Of course, with only 24 hours to work you can’t afford lengthy arguments, miscommunications or continued explanations. This means, as well as being able to communicate clearly, you need to employ patience with other teammates, especially towards the end of the project.

Furthermore, if you’re feeling confused, do not be afraid to ask questions. It will make everything smoother in the long run.

Perhaps most importantly of all, don’t forget to laugh. Sure, there might be some money on the line, but at the end of the day, hackathons should be an opportunity for making new contacts, trying out ideas and having fun. Losing your patience, manners and sense of humor is the antithesis of this.

Don’t Forget To Bring The Essentials

Although food and drink is generally provided at most hackathons, you’re still going to need some vital equipment to get through the day.

Perhaps most critically of all, remember to bring your laptop, tablet or whatever other gizmo (and their chargers!) you’re going to need to get through the day – otherwise embarrassment will ensue.

If you think you are going to try and grab some shuteye during the contest, you’ll probably also want to bring a sleeping bag or blanket.

Finally, a change of clothes is probably also a good idea, especially if you have been selected to present your project to the judges. Although not essential, you (and everyone else) likely appreciate a non-funky T-shirt after a long days hacking.

Want to put these tips to the test? Well, grab your tickets for Hire18 and register for your first-ever hackathon. Head over here to find out the rules and how to get involved.

Ever used an ATS platform, found something lacking and said, ‘There should be an app for that’? Here’s your chance.

SmartRecruiters is pleased to announce that its First Annual Hackathon will be held at the Hiring Success 18 conference in San Francisco from March 13-14th. However, the event is not only a first for SmartRecruiters, it is a first for the HR industry in general!

Hack-a-What?

Hackathons are now pretty common among developers, but for the uninitiated, they are organized events – usually held over a 24 or 48 hour period – in which groups of designers, developers and experts compete to create the best app, feature, or enhancements on top of an already existing platform, often for a cash prize and/or personal glory.

Traditional thinking dictates hackathons are the domains of coders, developers and technical experts. We want to to change that by letting our ticket-holding SmartRecruiters customers become developers for a day. This means, at Hire18, you’ll have the chance to work directly with our Talent Acquisition Suite Public APIs, and if required, the SmartRecruiters developers themselves.

So, if you’ve ever provided feedback to your ATS provider that has seemingly gone down a black hole, here is your opportunity to make that change happen.

We’ll Give You The Team You Need!

Don’t know the difference between a coding variable or conditional? No problem. We’ll give you the guys who do.

Teams will have the option of including two SmartRecruiters developers and/or one designer, assigned based on their relevant experience, to assist them in their project. This means if you or your company lacks the resources required, you can still join in the competition. All you need to do is come up with a great idea and communicate it clearly to your hackathon team. That’s it!

The best projects will be those which zero-in on a particular issue and deliver practical features that solve it. Extra points will be granted for durability and scalability, but if your idea just makes recruitment easier in a way we’ve never considered, you might be onto a winner.

So What Do I Win?

If your idea trumps all the others in the competition, then you’ve got a lot to look forward to, not least the $5000 prize money (to be split among the team members). It’s also likely your creation will eventually be rolled into the SmartRecruiters platform and assist recruiters and hiring managers around the world!

What Are The Rules and How Do I Get Involved?

Below are the full rules for the Hire18 Hackathon, including what you need to do to get access to the SmartRecruiters developers.

1. Customers teams are made up of 3-4 people. One of those team members must act as the spokesperson for the team during the final presentation.
2. Customers must prepare a working prototype of their “hack” within the 24-hour window, including one page design overview/requirements document.
3. Customers must demo their prototype to our panel of judges (leading analysts and venture capitalists in the space) and all Hire18 attendees in order to be qualified for the grand prize.
4. Customers must submit their idea, a paragraph summary, and full list of all participants (including contact information) by February 1, 2018 to product@smartrecruiters.com.
5. Customers must provide their own development, design, and product resources.  Should a customer have an idea and wish to participate, but not have access to their own development resources, they can borrow two (2) developer resources and one (1) design resource from the SmartRecruiters R&D team with the purchase of five (5) or more tickets to the Hire18.
6. Customers are limited to only the SmartRecruiters Public API. Details can be found at www.dev.smartrecruiters.com.  Development environments and machines must be supplied by the customer and their resources and will not be provided by SmartRecruiters.
7. All participants must have purchased a ticket to the Hire18 prior to the submission deadline.

As mentioned above, SmartRecruiters will be required to purchase an Hire18 ticket and deliver a short summary of their idea to product@smartrecruiters.com by February 1, 2018. Alternatively, you can apply via the form on our Hire18 Hackathon page. Entry includes three free meals, wifi, and access to Hire18’s Design and Development lab. The hackathon will be limited to 10 teams, so it’s important you apply as soon as possible to confirm a place.